Comic for Thursday, September 1st

I think that’s “Mir” for “thank you”. It’s a tricky dialect though. I could be wrong.

What has happened to Eff-Five will be somewhat more clear on the next page. Well. As clear as things get around here, which is to say I think we’ll have some idea in a few years 😉

I guess the next question if is Jayce is aware of who he’s supposed to be helping this time. I can’t imagine he gets paid enough to deal with this. Maybe he’s close to retirement and wants his pension. I imagine magic agent people have a slightly younger retirement than most…

The End of Chapter 6 is actually in sight. Though there is obviously a few threads still in need wrapping up… 😉 Of course, my chapters are usually pretty arbitrary anyway.

Looks like Naomi passed Tealy-The-Hacker girl in the poll. Well, it was a good run, Tealy.

Discussion (19) ¬

Hmm. Whatever he’s doing to disrupt the casting is either in all the models or is a trick that could be pulled off by anyone with the proper knowledge. More likely the models, which squashes at least one of the theories I had about F8.

It also occurred to me why they have different hair colors. F8 is blending in with the local population’s color theme. He looks like a designer child if both his eyes and his hair are blue. F5 was not going to be in public and so stuck with white hair. Its also why Teal hair is dying it, which means she’s also not a local (go figure). Perhaps this is Taki? If so, Peter’s kept her out of the loop. Miko’s lack of it marks her as a non-Local as well, which is mildly interesting.

More interesting is Tyler’s lack and his team. Most of them are marked as Designer, but he isn’t and both Amy and Mione don’t follow. Something about innate magic users?

Oh and MIR is making a joke of it. Red and Blue eyes with Purple hair.

I find F8’s lack of killing to be interesting. The fact he’d prefer not to would indicate either programming that requires him to avoid killing if possible or a spark of personality, if you will. His “sister” still looks like a human mind in a robot, so I don’t question that, but he clearly follows Laws and I find it interesting to watch the quirks come out. I can think of plenty of reasons not to kill, but I bet it was more effort and riskier to hold back.

You are correct as to why F8 (and Ila) have died their hair to match their eyes. F8’s originally hair color (which was too light to match his eyes and had a white streak in it) isn’t a retcon or mistake, but it may be awhile till we know what it was like that… 😉

In Malsa walking around with Blue Hair/Eyes or Blonde Hair/Yellow Eyes is pretty unremarkable, while even a natural coloration like Blond Hair/Blue Eyes marks you as definitely a foreigner (like Tyler).

Interestingly, as Blonde (or Yellow/Gold/Orange Hair) isn’t considered natural in Malsa, it’s actually a valid color for designer children, but it’s one of the less common ones (likely as it engenders some level of confusion with foreigners).

As for Tealy, she could probably pass for an unremarked foreigner if she didn’t dye her hair (half dyed hair would… attract some attention), but people more familiar with foreigners would probably think her eye color was weird or at least memorably/remarkable, while Teal Hair and Teal eyes is one of the most common combinations among female designer children, so she can pass as one without a second glance.

The problem with the system is that there are more asterisks on it than inter-dimensional trade treaty, but there are some general rules I think most people are picking up as we go 😛

And now we’ve gone too long to talk about Mir’s… coloration… or F8’s philosophies/restrictions… ah well… next time 😉

I was actually curious if when the redraw got to Mium if his hair color would change. Very curious why his hair would be so… distinctive if the goal was blend in.

My current theory on the mismatched eyes hair like Amy is that they are incomplete or misfires. It is possible the genetic editing technology is not perfect. Since pretty much all of them tend to be important characters, it is also possible that trying to take it too far produces failures, so they are stronger/smarter but maybe flawed. Just one theory. Another is that they are half-breeds, but that depends on how long Designer Children have been around. We have not seen enough older people to know if this is the first generation or not.

On one hand, this is definitely MYM. He is talking in , isn’t stuttering words, and talking about things F5 presumably wouldn’t know or care about.

On the other hand, he calls Mir “Doctor” without a snide comment, so it definitely is not MYM… All jokes aside, I’m wondering if MYM-F5 will be discernibly different than MYM-F8, or if MYM himself different now having added a new AI.

boy mir really hates mium and peter (as, im assuming, he was martin when he was “employed” in avon as his last undercover ops)
and ofcourse she’s really really posesive of things she belives are “hers”

also i found a spelling error. (its rare) in your q&a waaaaay down in the magic section.
“In particularly drastic cages, and mage can…”
im assuming cases not cages. and probaly “a mage…”

I’ve wondered before if Peter is Martin, but I’m not sure he is. I don’t think Peter was there long enough to be Martin, I think it’s more likely that Peter somehow stole or freed MYM from Martin.

While Peter could conceivably have created MYM, I don’t see him creating F8, and we know they were originally made by Martin. I think Martin is probably someone we haven’t met yet. Additionally, there is Mir’s borderline obsession with Martin, which makes me think they have a longer history. When Ila meets Peter, she says he is “In the top five” of people Mir wants to kill. I imagine Martin probably holds the #1 spot.

On the other hand, the whole Martin is missing and Ila recognizing Peter are both signs that make this plausible.

No problem. I think it’s going to be a few decades of broken links till we are on the side of the scales where I’ve fixed more of your mistakes then you’ve fixed of mine…

Makes me wonder if MYM ever considers subtly introducing spelling errors and broken links into people he doesn’t like’s correspondence… the opportunities would be endless. Forget Dues Ex Machina, I think he could realize a lifelong ambition of being Gremlin Ex Machina.

I’m not sure Mir has very broad streak of what most people would call human emotions, that’s for sure.

I also tend to read more glossaries, in-game-encyclopedias, etc, than (in some cases) play games. I think this may have been one of the flaws involve with my gaming making career back in the day now that I think about it… 😐

I know a lot of webcomic artists that work on this the other way, where they make their story then build the characters, then the world. That seems baffling to me. From my point of view, I barely even write the story. I just make the world, populate it with characters, and than the story just sort of happens from there. Most of my input is just from what sort of characters I drop into the world 😛 (yes, some people view me as slightly insane when comes to these things… )

It has it’s pros and cons. On one hand, I think it’s part of the reason for… slightly wandering aspect of the narrative shall we say (though definitely not the only reason). On the other, I think it does help make a story that’s sort of unique, as hopefully by the end it’ll seem like a story that could have only have come from the setting it came from while containing the hundreds of elements well-read people expect/anticipiate from stories, if that makes sense? 😛